


Talitha, Cumi

by Miladygrey



Category: Alias (TV)
Genre: And they lived spyfully ever after, Gen, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 16:47:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1655510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miladygrey/pseuds/Miladygrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coming back to life. Again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Talitha, Cumi

**Author's Note:**

> Written for yahtzee63's Dearly Departed ficathon in 2006, in which a character could be brought back to life. My requested character was Nadia, and some sisterly/auntly bonding was requested as well.
> 
> Title is Aramaic--"Little girl, arise"

Nadia has been resurrected twice, but remembers nothing about either time. No bright lights, no tunnels, no insights. Just coming to consciousness in a hospital bed, feeling change hovering around her. Death brings changes for all involved, even when it’s revoked.

The first time, there was no pain. There had been pain in the darkness, trapped and smothered and unable to scream except inside her head, unable to tell the voices, both familiar and unfamiliar, that she was still somehow aware. Then the darkness brightened, and the pain faded, and there were two fathers standing over her bed. She hadn’t known which to look at first. This time, there was pain. When she tried to scream, it came out a ragged crow’s squawk and hurt even more. No fathers around, no mothers, no sisters. Only multiple doctors and nurses, with their strong but impersonal hands, and the quasi-familiar face of Dixon hovering somewhere nearby. Later, he tells her that he would have stayed, but things started happening very quickly after she woke up, and he had to get back to APO.

She understands. People have compassion for orphans, but little time for them. By the time she woke up, she was essentially already an orphan. She just didn’t know it yet.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

No one tells her anything until after the fact. Her room is in the ICU, she has no TV to follow world events, or to understand why her nurse is tight-lipped and not chatty like most of them are. Sydney comes in, very late or very early, sporting Isabelle and several new bruises and contusions (though this is nothing new, not with Sydney), and starts explaining things. About her father, though she calls him “Sloane” in the same tone used to refer to Middle Eastern dictators, and Rambaldi (how she _hates_ that name now), and their mother. The words “explosion”, “cave-in”, and “shattered” are used. After that, Nadia doesn’t really hear her.

They died of the same thing, she and her mother, Nadia muses later. Breaking glass and a fall, pushed (one way or another) by someone who loved them. Though Nadia’s not really surprised that she was saved. She had Jack Bristow looking out for her. Irina Derevko forfeited his aid when she forsook her newborn granddaughter for an ancient, cryptic promise of power. As Nadia holds Isabelle in one arm and crying Sydney in the other, she cannot imagine making the same choice.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

Jack saved her, Marshall tells her, eyes shining and hands gesturing in abbreviated, eager motions that cannot convey the sheer coolness (his word) of the whole story. Jack had found her body lying amid glass and wood in her father’s abandoned house. Jack had detected the tiniest flicker of a pulse in one limp wrist and had an ambulance there only slightly less than instantaneously. Jack had called in favors to several doctors to give her the best care, and even to a well-known plastic surgeon so that the scar on her throat, while visible, is not the mutilation it might have been. Then Jack went off to save Sydney one more time, and never made it back to see the other life he’d saved.

She thanks him every day, touching the ridges of scar tissue on her neck and hands, and lights a candle in the hospital chapel for him. He might need it, down in the dark. She does not light one for her father.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

Vaughn drops by once, with Isabelle but without Sydney, and attempts small talk. It’s awkward--she still remembers he and Sydney fumbling a relationship back together, and she _knows_ he’s overheard her referring to him as Agent Forehead--but her niece is the perfect icebreaker. He smiles when Nadia calls her _chica mariposa._ “She’s going to grow up the most language-confused child in the world.”

“Do you think so?”

“Well, Syd handles the English, I keep slipping into French around her without meaning to, you’ve got the Spanish, and I can’t even count how many languages we probably speak between us…”

She tickles the baby’s soft tummy, and laughs when she does. “They say it’s good for children to learn foreign languages young.”

“I’ll refer her teacher to you when she starts speaking Mandarin in kindergarten.”

“Oh no. We won’t start the non-Romance languages until first grade.”

His forehead smooths right out when he laughs.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

“Did she mention me?”

Sydney does her the courtesy of not pretending to misunderstand. “No. She didn’t really talk about anything except Rambaldi, and what she was planning to do. She didn’t seem like herself.” Her fingers make little patterns in the fabric of the sheets. “Not that I’m a great judge of how she usually acted, but she seemed different.”

“Do you think she knew? About me?”

“I…don’t know. Sloane thought he’d killed you. Maybe that’s what he told her. She’d have no reason not to believe him.”

Nadia thinks of the mother she only knew for a day, beautiful, with edges, strong enough to shoot her sister in defense of her daughter, weak enough to betray the same daughter at the word of a mad dead Italian.

She thinks Irina only heard the bad news. That Sloane had shoved his-- _their_ daughter into a glass table and left her to bleed out. That the man she’d fought and loved for thirty years and more was now buried under tons of rock. And that all these things were in some way her fault, somehow caused by her obsessive quest. No wonder her mother hadn’t seemed herself. She was hollowed out, empty, and everything she‘d ever thought she wanted wasn‘t enough and never would be.

Later that day, she and Sydney say a Russian Orthodox prayer for the dead in the chapel. Hoping that lightning won’t strike, Nadia lights another candle, next to Jack’s.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

Eric is there one day, she’s not sure how long after. He makes a joke about using taxpayers’ money to get a month off and first-class airfare, but his eyes are completely serious. When he takes her hand, he doesn’t let go.

“I wanted to come, before. When you--”

Those few days were limbo, between one life and the next. They don’t seem real now, save for the scars left behind. “It’s all right, Eric.”

“No, it’s not. I mean, there wasn’t even time, Syd called and I was packing, then Jack called and said you were back in the hospital, and then the world almost ended--though that’s the oldest excuse in the world, I know--”

She puts her free hand to his mouth, feels a few more words flutter against her fingers and slide unsaid into the hollow of her palm. “No, it really is all right. I knew you would come. You did before.”

He draws her head to his chest, and she leans against him and listens to the comforting, alive sound of his heartbeat. Everything else can be said later. It’s the truth, after all--she always knew he would come. In a world of spies and confusions, Eric is the constant one. Even had she remained dead, she’s quite sure he’d have barged in at some point, demanding a chess set or a fiddle or some other way to beat the odds.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

She and Sydney walk and talk outside in the hospital gardens. Neither of them ever mention that visit in-between deaths, where Nadia cooed over Isabelle with Sloane nearby. It is forgotten, it never happened.

“We still want you to be her godmother,” Sydney says shyly. “We never quite managed to get her baptized, what with one thing and another, and I was going to ask you, but--”

“--there were complications,” Nadia finishes. No need to go into details, it’s been discussed enough. “And I would love to, of course.”

The baptism is finally accomplished in a small, pretty church down the street. Though the front pew is left empty, out of respect and probably some healthy fear of the shade of Jack Bristow, most of APO is there. Dixon and his children and Director Chase (she stares, and Sydney mouths _tell you later_ ), and Rachel looking fragile and sad and hopeful, and Eric, wearing a small yarmulke (“Can’t hurt her to have two religions on her side, right?“) and beaming at her. Her day pass from the hospital looped around her wrist, Nadia makes all the solemn promises to Sydney and Vaughn, absently stroking Isabelle’s soft hair with two fingers. _I will teach you, I will guide you, I will guard you, I will love you. This is what I was born to do._

_This is what I was brought back to do._


End file.
